Design with Data Using Invision’s Brand New Plugin

Craft is InVision’s suite of screen-design tools that lets designers easily add content with a click. Two things designers value in their workflows—speed and data—are efficiently brought into their projects thanks to Craft.

Now, Invision is debuting Data within Craft; Data is a free plugin that lets designers pull things like text, images and JSON values out of public API sites live, and add them directly into Sketch.

Previously, designers could only pull in text and images from places like Dropbox, their local files, websites, Unsplash and from built-in data. Thanks to the JSON tab, creatives can now enter URLs or drop in JSON files to assign values to design elements. After this, they can utilize the duplicate plugin to create unique design components with only a click—each one featuring new data from their API.

If you have already been using Craft you’ll find significant changes in the interface, thanks to Data. For one thing, the “type” and “photos” plugins have now been consolidated within Data, thereby simplifying the menu so that you’ll find all of the images and text that you pull in one, well-organized location.

Grabbing images and text from live sites has never been more streamlined, as it happens in the same menu. Simply click on a photo to fill anything with an image; you can also do the same with text. As with the other data tools, when you duplicate this content, Data will let you pull more content from the same webpage.

Draft centers around three “modes” that speed up workflows:

Custom: This tab lets you fill your design with customized photos and text with only a few clicks. To drop in random user names, for instance, simply choose a few bits of text and then click “Names”. This process is the same with the rest of the categories (Cities, Headlines, Currency, etc.).

Web: This tab lets you pull in photos and text from any site that’s desirable. Just as with the Custom tab, simply pick a block of text or the image and then click the text or image on the site itself.

JSON: This tab allows you to plug in APIs to access and then design with any kind of data you choose. This feature is ideal if you want to design with either public data from an external source or your own API data.